She sat back, smiling with relief. “You didn’t need me.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.” He started to force a smile, then felt it become real. “Thank you. I’m very glad I’m on your ship.”
Desjani smiled at him again, then swallowed and looked uncertain before standing abruptly. “Thank you, sir. I should get back to the bridge.”
“Sure. If you see Co-President Rione, tell her I’m okay.”
“I will, sir.” Desjani saluted quickly and then hastened out the hatch.
Geary sat for a while, thinking, then reached slowly for the controls of the display. The image of Ixion Star System appeared, the Alliance fleet on it in the tangled disposition it had been in when it entered jump at Lakota, and in which it would be when it arrived at Ixion. I have to think of something. But what?
TWELVE
“SIR, this is Lieutenant Iger in intelligence. We have something important that we need to brief to you.”
Geary, feeling depression creeping up again as good options in Ixion eluded him, took a moment to consider whether he should answer, but duty sat on his chest and glared at him until he reached out to acknowledge the message. “What does important mean?” he asked.
“I…it’s hard to judge, sir. It’s something very unexpected, and we really don’t know what it means, but it could be critically important.”
Intelligence loved modifiers like “could be,” but it was unusual to have them frankly admit to not knowing what something meant.
“We have everything ready to show you down here, or I can come up there and brief you, sir,” Iger continued, “whenever it’s convenient.”
Geary looked around. Facing the crew of Dauntless again after the desperate retreat out of Lakota still felt, well, daunting. But he’d increasingly felt as if this stateroom were a prison, one that he had locked himself inside.
It was long past time he got out there and tried to be a fleet commander again. “I’ll come down there. Is right now okay?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be waiting, sir.”
Standing up, Geary checked his appearance, grimaced, then took a while to clean up and put on a fresh uniform. No matter what had happened at Lakota, he couldn’t look defeated.
The members of Dauntless’s crew who he encountered wore expressions of worry, which lit with hope when they saw him. Geary tried to project confidence despite the gloom filling him and apparently fooled most or all of them. He’d learned as a junior officer dealing with superior officers that if you acted like you knew what you doing, everyone else assumed you really did know it.
“What will we do at Ixion?” an anxious sailor blurted at Geary. “Sir?”
“I’m still considering options,” Geary replied, as if there were a lot to choose from and any of them were good. But the sailor smiled, reassured, and saluted briskly.
As he reached the intelligence section, sealed behind multiple high-security hatches, Geary pondered the fact that an intelligence officer had been able to motivate him out of his stateroom, something that neither combat officer Desjani nor politician Rione had succeeded in doing. That had to rank high on the irony scale.
Lieutenant Iger awaited Geary, looking nervous as Geary took a seat and waited. “Sir, we’ve been analyzing the messages passed among the ships of the Syndic flotilla that arrived via the hypernet gate while we were in the Lakota Star System.”
“How much of that can you intercept and break?” Geary asked.
“Not a lot, but some stray signals always leak, and if we remain in the star system long enough for them to reach us, we can record them and then try to break the encryption,” Iger explained. “It’s not even remotely a source of real-time intelligence, though if we ever broke an enemy message in time to influence an ongoing engagement, we’d certainly bring it to your attention.”
“I assume you’d let me decide if the message could influence the engagement?” Geary asked, knowing that the intelligence types were probably making such calls themselves.
“Uh, yes, sir,” Lieutenant Iger assured him, doubtless already planning to make sure that was done in the future.
“I take it there was something important about the signals you picked up at Lakota?”
“Yes, sir,” Iger repeated. “Unusual. Very unusual.” He paused, licked his lips, then spoke quickly. “Sir, it’s our assessment that the Syndics were as surprised by their arrival in Lakota as we were.”
Geary wondered if he had heard right. “You mean the Syndics already in the star system were surprised by the arrival of reinforcements?” Why would that conclusion bother the intelligence officer?
“No, sir. The only interpretation that matches the messages we’ve been able to break is that the Syndic ships that arrived via the hypernet gate were totally surprised to be at Lakota. They thought they’d be arriving in Andvari Star System.”
It took a moment for Geary to realize he was staring at the lieutenant. “How often does that sort of thing happen with hypernet travel?” No one had ever mentioned to him ships getting lost in the hypernet.
“It doesn’t, sir,” Lieutenant Iger insisted. “The use of a key is exceedingly simple. On the control panel you choose the actual name of the star system you’re going to. Once you’re on your way between gates, the key still displays the destination star. It would take multiple acts of extreme stupidity or denial to avoid knowing which star you were going to. As far as our files go, and they’re very detailed, no ship using the hypernet has ever gone to any star system except the one it intended going to. The process is too simple for even an idiot to mess up.”
“Don’t underestimate idiots, Lieutenant. Could something have been wrong with their hypernet key?”
Iger made a frustrated gesture. “Again, sir, as far as we know, any problem with the key serious enough to cause that kind of error should have led to it not operating at all.”
Geary sat back, thinking, while Lieutenant Iger waited, looking unhappy. He probably expects me to start tearing him and his analysis apart. So why would he brief it to me unless he believes it must be true? “Assume your analysis is correct,” Geary began, drawing a clear look of relief from Iger. “How could the destination of those ships have been different from what they keyed in?”
Iger shook his head. “According to our experts, there isn’t any way.”
“Did you talk to Captain Cresida?”
This time Iger looked surprised that Geary knew Cresida was one of the fleet’s experts on the hypernet system. “No, sir, we couldn’t get that long and complex a message to her ship while the fleet was in jump space. But we did call up a learning simulation based on the teachings of several of the Alliance’s leading experts on hypernet, presented it as a theoretical situation, and asked if it were possible. The avatars of the experts in the simulation were all positive that it couldn’t happen.”
“There’s no way to change a destination in midjourney on the hypernet? None at all?”
“No, sir,” Iger stated firmly. “But there’s only one alternative to that having happened. That’s if the Syndics were trying to deceive us and deliberately broadcast a lot of misleading messages knowing we’d pick up some of them and eventually break some of those we intercepted.”
“Why don’t you think they did that?”
Iger grimaced this time. “Occam’s razor mostly, sir. A deliberate deception in this case would be a very complex and uncertain operation. The simplest explanation, that the messages are real, is the best. And the messages feel real, sir. Nothing about them seems deceptive. Everything about them matches our experience with valid Syndic communications. And we can’t think of any explanation why the Syndics would try to fool us that way.”
“To keep us from using their own hypernet? Sow doubt that it was reliable?”
“But they couldn’t know we would pick those signals, sir. Some of them were flying as soon as the Syndics arrived at Lakota, before they even could have absorbed the news that our fleet was there as well.”
Geary nodded. “How confident are you of your assessment that the Syndic fleet that came out of the hypernet gate at Lakota didn’t intend going to Lakota?”
